Free Republic

While hydrogen's high energy per mass makes it an excellent fuel, it's awfully hard and expensive to store long-term. That could change, thanks to the work of researchers at Switzerland's ETH Zurich. They've worked out a way to store hydrogen in ordinary steel-walled containers for months without losing it into the atmosphere – using iron. The research team led by Wendelin Stark, Professor of Functional Materials at ETH Zurich, hit upon this method by drawing from the steam-iron process of producing hydrogen, first invented in 1784. The group's storage solution is especially suitable in places like Switzerland, where solar power...

Here's a case for which solving an energy problem could ease a challenging environmental problem as well. Researchers have discovered that carbonized chicken feathers could provide an inexpensive, environmentally friendly way to store hydrogen fuel for future motor vehicles. If the concept is proven--and perhaps a bigger if, accepted by the automobile industry--it could go a long way toward helping to dispose of the 2.7 billion kilograms of chicken feathers generated each year by commercial poultry operations. Hydrogen is a leading alternative fuel for vehicles. The byproducts of its combustion are nonpolluting, and its source--water--is superabundant. One hitch is the...

If the hoped-for hydrogen economy is ever to become a reality, researchers must devise efficient ways to produce and store the gas. That will require a series of breakthroughs that have been slow in coming. But researchers in the United States have hit upon a material for storing hydrogen that could be far better than the competition--just the sort of break hydrogen researchers are looking for. Hydrogen has long been seen as a potentially green alternative to gasoline, which is produced from fossil fuels and gives off the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide when burned. When piped through a fuel cell,...